Weird Sex Books Can be Art, Too

I was listening to my Play Later queue on my favourite podcast app — like my Youtube Watch Later playlist, it’s rather unwieldy and extensive — and as usual, I ended up adding a recent episode that caught my fancy.

This one happened to be about what might be the most notorious Canlit book, or even the most notorious Canadian book, of all time — Bear.

Yes, I’m talking about the book where a woman falls in love with and has sex with a bear. That book.

Content warning for sexual subject matter and allusions follows — if you couldn’t tell by the title. Read at your own risk. There will also be spoilers for this and a few other books. As an additional note, I refer to “men” and “women” in this post, but it does not encompass the issues faced by fellow members of the LGBTQ+ community — although those issues are most comparable to the ones faced by those society perceives as women.

Wait, come back

First off, I’m not going into any of the really explicit details. Here’s the thing about sex — although many people, particularly Americans, have been trained into puritanical instincts of shock and fear at the mere mention of it, it’s part of life. And sex on the page and in media isn’t just about the physical act. It can show you things about the characters’ relationship to each other. Masturbation or fantasies, solitary sex acts, can be used to show a character’s mental state, self-esteem, or even frame them in the societal perceptions of others.